Putting a Value on Public Lands: Outdoor and energy industries work toward coexistence.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: TRAVEL TOURISM

Colorado boasts 14.5 million acres of National Forest Service land and another 8.4 million acres overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. That's more than 34 percent of the state.

Colorado's public lands are not just vast; they're also a huge economic driver. The numbers are staggering for both of the big industries that rely on the state's public lands: energy and outdoor recreation.

Both are heavyweights. The Boulder-based Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) estimates outdoor recreation is a $28 billion industry in Colorado, about 60 percent higher than the national average on a per-capita basis. The American Petroleum Institute has pegged oil and gas as a $31 billion industry in the state.

Nationally, outdoor recreation is a behemoth: Americans spend $887 billion a year annually in the U.S., according to OIA data. That's more than twice what Americans spend on oil and gas in a given year.

"We have economic data that shows we're 2 percent of [national] GDP, and growing faster nationally than GDP," OIA Executive Director Amy Roberts says. She cites a 2016 report from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis that found outdoor recreation was a bigger industry than legal services or agriculture.

That economic output is inextricably tied to the presence of public lands. "We see public lands as the infrastructure for the outdoor recreation economy in the same way highways are infrastructure for transportation," Roberts says.

But the industry often doesn't get its due when it comes to policy-making and economic development. "We're a multi-billion-dollar economy," says Luis Benitez, director of the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Industry Office. "We're actually bigger than the auto industry in the United States."

Benitez notes that the maintenance of infrastructure--trail projects, cleanup programs and the like--is largely volunteer work. "It's like the auto industry having volunteer engineers on the weekends," he laughs.

Blame that on a lack of funding. The federal Land and Water Conservation Fund generates about $2.5 million a day from offshore drilling fees, but it has been funded to its authorized cap of $900 million only twice since its establishment in the mid-1960s. Congress "tends to spend it on other needs," Roberts says, even with current maintenance backlogs of about $12 billion at the National Park Service and $8 billion at the National Forest Service.

"We feel we're paying enough into the Treasury," Roberts says, "but we're not seeing...